Dusting off the Blogwebs · 3:13am May 18th, 2018
It has been three months since my last blog post. It seems like a good time for an update.
First off, the straight-up news:
For those that don't know, Tumbleweed put together the Springtime Sequel-Slash-Sandbox Switcheroo (group here) running from approximately mid-March to late April. I signed up and was assigned FanOfMostEverything. That went over well enough and you all have Daring Do and the Ancient Outpost as a result.
As of writing this, it has been about 22 days since I submitted the story to Equestria Daily. There has been no reply so far.
As part of the Switcheroo, while you write a story for the person you are assigned to, you are also matched with another person who will be writing a story for you. That's just how it works, you know. Well, we're creeping up to "one month" after the "deadline" (it was very soft), and whichever writer I have been assigned to (I still can't be sure) has not completed their story that I know of. I was half-expecting to be that person, so I can't really complain, and I would be happy for them if they still have plans to write it (ever), but I'm about ready to switch my expectations to "not getting one". I'm slightly disappointed (maybe it's "unsatisfied"?) that Tumbleweed hasn't made any post or such to give the Switcheroo any sort of resolution or update since the deadline, but I haven't exactly voiced that so I have no rights to complain there, either.
You can kinda blame hawthornbunny for this blog post, because:
hawthornbunny Last Tuesday at 5:16 PM
@Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Fic you'd be within your rights to blog about that
... which is how I'm going to segue into the second part of this.
I've been considering doing something more interesting with my blog besides the quarterly update or whatever you call these irregular things. I think the general criteria that I would like that something to fulfill are a balance between "interesting for you to read", "interesting for me to write", and "not overdone or done better elsewhere where I could just make a comment to add all both of my cents". An example for that last one is FoME's Friendship is Card Games series, which I would sooner contribute my episode-related thoughts to than write up my own reviews. Especially since I'm a little behind in watching everything anyway. Perhaps one happy side-effect of this "something" would be me learning things as a result.
Those of you who have followed me for forever-ish and have memories that last more than two weeks or who poke around user pages even half as often as I do probably know that I once conducted a few interviews. This is not the "something" that I am looking for, as I am firstly unsure if that achieved what I had been hoping for in the first place, and otherwise I would happy to consider continuing them but I don't want that to be a primary focus at this point in time.
"I wrote a story once so have some generic writing advice" blogs seem a dime a dozen (though they're worth a lot more (on average) on this site, it seems, as we have a lot of great writers who are happy to tell you how they do it). I also don't see myself as a fantastic writer in any regard beyond that I've, you know, written fantasy stories here. I can also point you to Viking ZX's Being a Better Writer series and probably safely leave it at that.
After thinking about this for a moment (you might think I'd have done that before writing up this blog...), I do wonder if I'm just itching for more community interaction and am unsatisfied with the number of comments my stories seem to fetch. It might help if I wrote more stories, though.* Maybe I'm just feeling a bit unspectacular and want to change that. Maybe my perspective is just askew and I'm overcomplicating this and putting aside what I should be doing instead.
*Explaining why I haven't is for another blog post. Someday.
Regardless of who has done what or what I'm hoping to accomplish, there are things that I'm simply not going to blog about. Which I won't get into, but may eliminate an idea or two.
So with that said, I'm open to thoughts and suggestions. I currently have – at best – a couple of vague ideas.
Nothing really comes to mind in terms of possible things to do with your blog. More stories will, in theory, increase your visibility through curious passersby, but the key phrase there is "in theory." Sorry.
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So would commenting on at least half of all stories on the site, but I just don't have that kind of reading time.
That's sort of related to the not-enough-writing-time thing. Who'd have guessed?
I at least have some thinking time, but I keep running into knowledge barriers, or at least limitations on what I want to publicly blog about given my limited knowledge/experience. I try and stay aware of the Dunning-Kruger effect and how it applies to me so I can keep the overconfidence spike under control. The flipside is that now I look at my user page and what I wrote some year or so ago and think "Maybe 'semi-experienced' is still a little bit too strong."